Nowadays there is a shared vision among industry, operators and academy that 5G wireless networks will have to provide wideband wireless access and ubiquitous computing anywhere and at any time. The human life of the majority of the EU citizens will be surrounded by intelligent wireless sensors, which will bring radical changes to the way we live and do things. Supporting this scenario is a challenge for network operators and wireless network infrastructures and it will demand a tremendous performance improvement of medium range wireless infrastructure. This challenge needs to be addressed by a convergence of advanced semiconductor nanotechnology and a robust wireless infrastructure based on meshed networks with seamless fiber performances.
The DRAGON project, through the exploitation of the radio spectrum in D-band (130-174.8 GHz) , will overcome the constraints of current E-band wireless backhaul solutions to achieve a small-form factor and high-capacity radio solution, suitable for massive deployment, that will enable bringing the speed of optical systems to backhaul systems in a cost effective way. The DRAGON project vision and objectives rely on a power efficient and silicon based BiCMOS transceiver analog front end, operating in D-band and enabling cost efficient deployment of telecommunications networks with seamless fiber performance. A beam steering integrated antenna array using an intelligent low-cost packaging technology will be developed for the implementation of the 5G network demo trial on field, with fine beam alignment for facilitating the installation and compensating pole vibration.
The project objectives are the following
Objective 1 On-field network demonstration of a wireless link at data rate up to 100 Gbs in D-band, based on:
• low-cost SiGe BiCMOS transceiver analog front end derived from the chip set developed in the DREAM project;
• ≥1024 element phased array active antenna;
• ≥256-QAM digital base band processor with Adaptive Modulation;
• Flexible Duplexing (fFDD), Full Duplexing (FD) and LoS-MIMO functionalities.
Objective 2 Commercially enable wireless small cell backhauling links, with the very high throughput allowed by D-band frequency carriers. The future Small Cells access point networks will require the availability on the market of compact and reliable D-band radios, which could even be integrated within the access point, to get low latency and multi-gigabit end-to-end connectivity at the cell edge with a cost effective approach and low visual impact.
Objective 3 Increase the Quality of Service (QoS) and the flexibility for the network operator, by enabling the gradual virtualization of the radio protocol in centralized baseband (vRAN), through fiber-like D-band Front hauling. Small cell X-hauling connections, enabled by compact and low-cost D-band transceiver, with antenna fine beam steering option, allow the network coordination algorithm and the carrier aggregation.
Objective 4 Reduction of the cost and power consumption (green radio) of high data rate small cell backhaul/fronthaul links in D-band. The use of D-band radios, with high EIRP and antennas with fine beam adjustment, results in a reduced emitted power requirement, more efficient transmitter implementation and a better efficiency of the spectrum usage (since high frequency reuse can be achieved). The project targets to reduce significantly the radios and network power consumption due per bit delivered.
